Clara Munson felt that something is wrong at the very moment when he came home after a long Easter celebration and found her waiting for 2 people, removing from her home. The owner of a modest home in new haven, Connecticut, Clara instinctively realized that the case concerns a young couple who rented a room in the same day, 23 April 1916.
They were hard to miss. Her husband was a handsome man in a great suit with dark expressive eyes and dark, wavy hair. The wife was a hottie. Slender, well-dressed, she was also dark-eyed and dark-haired. They were United by one trait: both were deaf and dumb. Although they communicated only in sign language, between them, there was tension.
Joseph Castelli and Francesco Vetere in The Hartford Courant, Oct. 5, 1917. pic.twitter.com/iZrzg2U8LN
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When one of the women guests told her that he heard a noise coming from the room the pair, and then the husband in a hurry left, Munson realized that behind the door waiting for her the bad news.
In the room, she found a terrible picture. The girl was lying on the floor, covered in blood. Amazingly, she was still alive. However, the miracle did not happen, and she soon died in the hospital, turning the small town into the site of a terrible and mysterious crime.
Police learned from the owner of the house that the couple’s names she never heard. But prompted by an important detail: my husband insisted on a room with a large pantry.
Over the next 2 days the police combed the school for the deaf New England, but it has not brought success. Then they decided to send a request to the schools of new York. And told them about the angry husband whose wife at Easter, fled with her lover. Husband received a postcard in the mail – with a stamp of new haven – where it was said that she «leaves him» and the husband demanded that the police found his wife and brought her home. Husband, 25-year-old Joseph Castelli was deaf. As well as his lovely dark-haired wife Anna (23).
The police immediately decided that the husband was their main suspect, but they were disappointed when Clara Munson said that a room with a girl she didn’t take it.
The police decided that he may know the true culprit. Interviewing friends and neighbors a pair of Upper Manhattan and the mother of the girl, they finally found another suspect. Them were Francesco Vetere – an old friend Castelli, and his best man at the wedding. He, too, was deaf. After an old-fashioned interrogation, when the suspect did not give is, to sleep, the police received a full picture of what happened and the recognition of the deeds of both suspects.
Vetere (23) and Castelli were very friendly. They immigrated to Brooklyn children from Calabria, Italy, and both in childhood lost her hearing due to spinal meningitis.
Castelli recently married Anne, the mother of the 3 children when he was able to divert her from her first husband. But the marriage soon cracked, because the husband does not want to work and wanted to work out Anna. Even worse was when he showed rudeness towards his wife, and he was arrested and put in jail for a few months.
While her husband was not home for so long, Vetere, actor in vaudeville, with the filing Castelli, began to seduce Anna.
Together the men came up with a terrible plan to rid of Anna after she refused to divorce. Job Vetere was to persuade Anne to run away with him, and Castelli followed them to new haven, where he hid in a storage room, when the young people left for lunch. Upon returning to the room Vetere was distracted by Anna and Castelli came out of the pantry, swinging the iron bar. He acknowledged that several times knocked her on the head when she was already lying on the floor. «A drop hit me on the glove, I washed it» — he described a crime.
Vetere admitted: «I watched as he raised the rod, and turned away when he hit her. He hit her a few times to make sure she’s dead.»
Vetere, who wrote a postcard on behalf of Anna, confessed the full complicity in the crime and receiving the generous sum of $100.
The Connecticut jury took 3 hours to verdict for both. At trial, the mother of Anna spat at his son-in-law and used their own language of gestures: he ran his fingers over the neck, probably hinting at his imminent execution.
In the letter, written by Vetere with his family, the man repents of sins. Turning to God, he urged relatives to take care of children that they had not turned to evil. He asked «to keep them away from bad friends, as they grow».
Few days childhood friends silently hung the same day on a cold morning 5 October 1917.
